Writing is a system of interpretable signs, that makes possible the durable recording, preservation, and communication of human thought, speech and musical composition. The graphic signs of writing in the present sense, letters, numerals, musical notation, and the other signs supplementary to these, have exactly defined functions. The necessity and evolution of writing, and also of notation progressed, kept developing, or stagnated at a certain level in different geographic and ethical regions always in harmony with social demand. The development and perfection of writing was influenced by the complexity of communication, the variety of subjects, the already attained level of the knowledge of characters, and development level of the tools of recording. Writing developed on such fundamentals generally in four phases:
The forerunner of writing, mnemotechnics; various objects found in nature (coloured pebbles, sprigs, feathers etc.), or drawings at a level of higher development indicated the content of the message.
Pictography; with which the history of writing in the stricter sense begins. This communicated the subject matter by sketchy, simplified images of the events.
Ideography; some pictograms became shortened, and recorded only essential elements. The short pictograms attained stability, though they still had variable meanings, thus their sense could be understood only by the context of the message. The use of ideograms led to the development of word-sign writing, where the sign referred to the word that marked the idea, and not to the idea itself. The early hieroglyphic writing of ancient Egypt, and the old pictography of the Sumerians and Babylonians, and present day Chinese writing were originally world-sign writings. In the course of time syllabic writing evolved from the signs of monosyllabic words. In this the syllabic sign had already been divorced from the original concept, and its name, and became suitable for indicating an independent sequence of sounds. Present-day Japanese writing, Cretan writing, the ancient runic writing of the Hungarians, and the Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform writings, in which the characteristics of pictography disappeared in the course of time, and writing changed to a combination of vertical, horizontal, and slanting lines, are all syllabic writings.
Phonography is the last step. This breaks up the sequence of sound marking the idea into separate sounds, instead of syllables. The various sounds are represented by signs, that is letters, therefore the letters may be seen as shortened images of syllabic signs. The development of writing with characters is related to the Phoenicians (15th-12th century B. C.), but some signs of sounds, and syllabic marks can also be found in cuneiform writing and in the hieroglyphs. Phonography made possible the development of letters, and their systems of different languages.
When the evolution of musical notation is traced, it becomes clear that it attained its present level of development equivalent to that of phonography through phases identical to the development of the latter, but with a considerable time-lag. There are several reasons for this delay. One of these is that the musical sound requires far more complex definition in itself than spoken sound. When music is recorded in writing, it must refer simultaneously to the exact pitch and length of each sound, and the musical text must give an unambiguous representation of the rhythm of the musical sentence, the lilt of the melody and its phrase, besides the mutual relations of sounds in pitch and time-value. Presumably. The other reason is that music-just like folktales, folk songs, spread orally and its practice, including the tunes, was handed down in small communities fairly exactly. Oral traditions did not require precise recording for a long time.
Since music and speech were not sharply separated from one-another in the early history of mankind, their common root was the lilt, where speech and melody are closely related, it therefore natural that the sources related to the early period are identical in both cases.
We have only indirect knowledge of the world of sound of music in ancient ages, since notation in the present sense was unknown in the ancient East, and to people outside Europe, even to the ancient Greeks. But certain systems of representation prior to notation survived, and these contained information even for the presentation of music. They were made necessary by the precise rules of music concerning ritual, which determined the melody to be sung to a given text, the manner of its presentation, and also the kind of instrument. The latter limited the range of sound, thus musicians familiar with the ritual and traditions only had to be reminded of the turns of melody and rhythm of the given text.
Four groups of these memory-prodding signs are known:
pictorial representations, which recorded only a moment of the musical performance,
ekphonetic (accent) signs, which marked the phrase and accents of the musical message,
cheironomies (manual directions), which referred tooth lilt of the melody by drawing in the air the upwards, or downwards changes of the melody by hand,
special signs invented directly for recording music.
The oldest musical signs originated in the Ancient Kingdom of Egypt. The time of recording has also been established with approximate precision from the figural, instrumental representations of the archeological findings. Only male musicians are seen mostly on pictures made at the time of the Ancient Kingdom, with the instruments known at the time, both harps and flutes. Representations of female musicians, complete with the new types of instruments: drums, lutes, lyres, trumpets, and double-fifes were made at the time of the New Kingdom. Groups of clapping singers seen beside the musicians refer to rhythm. The types of instruments used also indicate whether the music played is sacred, or profane.
Some records also survived from the 5th-7th centuries B. C., composed of certain coloured circles to be interpreted in relation to cosmologic systems.
Cheironomic signs are in several figural representations of musical scenes. The figures of the musician, and the conductor sitting in front of him together indicate musical motives consisting of two or three parts, or the hand movement of the musicians indicates the tune.
Besides the pictorial representations, hieroglyphic pictograms also exist, which indicate turns in the music by multiplying, or repeating certain sonants.
There is another notation known from the time of late Egypt, which presumably used special signs. Instead of pictorial indications the sequence of vertical graphic lines arranged on a common line is presumably a notation meant to be sung.
The only survivors of ancient Hebrew music are the neginas, accent marks for reciting the Tora. These groups of signs consisted a combination of points and lines, and were originally auxiliary means of memorizing, and articulating the text, but also became suitable for indicating repetitive, returning turns of melody. There were two or three systems of these signs in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, which served to suggest the melody by their form and function.
We also know Coptic notations from Christian Egypt that remain undecyphered to this day. They used two kinds of signs. Either they marked a known melody in the text by letters, or they placed ekphonetic groups of signs, consisting of slanted lines above the lines of the text, according to some system. Occasionally they also included Greek, Byzantine, and Hebrew elements, or syllabic signs. The character of Coptic notation was similar to cuneiform writing, which used syllabic signs, and whose system of signs consisted of combinations of vertical, horizontal and slanted lines. A clay tablet with Sumerian cuneiform writing was also discovered, which is presumed to contain musical signs as well. There are three columns on the tablet. The middle column contains the description of a legend in Sumerian, while the column on the right its Akkadian translation. On the other hand, the left-hand column consists of hitherto undecyphered syllables repeated several times in each line, arranged in identical order with the lines of the text.
These syllables going back to Sumerian origin meant certain phases of melodies, motives, or rhythm models with the Assyrians, and elsewhere too in the East, and each of them were indicated by definite names. At that level only these syllables prompted the memory of the musicians. This is termed syllabic notation, the equivalent of which in the development of writing is word-sign, or syllabic writing.
The scope of this article does not allow detailed analysis of the varieties of notation of non-European peoples. It is pertinent however, that numeric, letter, and optical notation cultivated at a highly developed level also existed in China and Japan. In India numerical and accent record notations were used simultaneously in different regions. But these came to a halt at a certain level of development, and West European notation has been adopted by now in these countries as well.
A small number of musical documents of ancient Europe relates to the Greeks. The Greeks adopted the sonic sign, that is character writing developed by the Phoenicians in the 9th century B. C. They supplemented this alphabet, which consisted of consonants only, with the developed sonic signs of the vowels. Thus the Greek alphabet became the first clean sonic, phonetic writing consisting of consonants and vowels. It is the forebear of all East and West European writing, and also the basis of the recording in writing of the sound of music.
In spite of their developed writing, and even though music was an important component of their lives, the Greeks did not consider the recording of music important. According to Aristoxenos, the recording of sounds was a common custom, melodies should be preserved by memory. The few written relics of Hellenic times (for educational purposes, or the decoration of reliefs) display two different kinds of notation. Both of these were character notations based on phonetic writing.
Music for instruments was recorded in the archaic alphabet, while vocal works were written using the later, classical Greek alphabet complete with vowels. Notation was written in three lines for instrumental music: the top line consisted of characters in the usual upright position, the characters used on the middle line were turned sideways, and characters of the top line were written in mirror-writing on the third line. The sounds to be played were determined together by the three lines, and the lines had to be read together. They needed this complicated system of notation, since the register included more letters than alphabet. Their instrumental notation (compiled also by several, presumably Phoenician signs) already met the quality of suggestiveness indispensable for notation, in spite of its complications, owing to the clear arrangement of the signs, and the clarity of the lines. The vocal notations did not follow this kind of orderliness. The Greeks also used special musical signs as supplements to the alphabetic notation, which enabled them to indicate emphatic and unaccented sounds, as well as the rhythmic values of the wordless phases of the melody. The Greek notation is the only one which had fully developed in ancient times.
The above is valid only in respect of ancient notations, and it does not follow that our present day notation is of Greek origin. The real bases of the latter evolved later in medieval Eastern and Western Europe, in Byzantium and the Carolingian Empire, almost simultaneously (about the 9th century), independently of one-another, based on identical layers, yet with a different content. The reason that triggered the necessity of recording in both cases was the unification of liturgies and ritual and the relevant musical recitations, which were also a means of consolidating the power of the state. The common origin was cheironomy, writing, directing the melody with manual sings. A new notation, composed of independent elements, recording emphases consisted of neumes. Neume writing evolved from writing down the cheironomic signs coupled with the accents of Greek prosody. This notation really suited the purposes of music.
Neume writing spread fast in the East as well as in the West, and it mirrored certain national peculiarities in each of its versions. Several Slav notations developed from the Eastern variations, but these failed to develop further, and current practice uses the West European system of notation on lines.
Current notation envolved from the Western variations of neume writing. It gradually attained in the course of ten centuries, standards of reflecting the contents its own, fully satisfactory form of language, and developed its system of recording equal to writing, but completely different, special, independent, and internationally unambiguously interpreted.